Hotel Online Marketing Budget Resolutions for 2012

Written by Ronnie on January 9, 2012

Q: It’s a new year and a new planning and budgeting season. It’s exciting reading about all the online marketing possibilities, technologies and trends; but how on earth do we figure out a budget for everything? If we under-budget, we may miss the boat to generate returns. If we over-budget, we can’t recoup our expenses. Plus, how do we know when and how much to invest in some forward-thinking marketing, like mobile?

A: This is a great question that’s very difficult to answer because it will be unique for each hotel. That’s why you can easily find great information about marketing efforts you should make, but either no, little or confusing information about how to fund those efforts.

We have two answers for you.

First, to figure out how much to budget in actual dollars — in aggregate and for separate endeavors — simply use our Online Marketing Budget Tool for Hotels.

Our Budget Tool is designed specifically for hotels, and even better, specifically for yours. You give us a few key pieces of information, like your geographic market and the amenities you offer, and we instantly deliver dollar amounts tailored to your needs.

It’s one thing to talk about the areas of your marketing program — from old standbys like SEO and PPC to new frontiers like Conversion Rate Optimization and blog development — that deserve investment and can pay off big dividends. But it can still be very challenging figuring out how much you should budget to online marketing in general, much less specific components.

Second, to decide which marketing activities to prioritize, we suggest you make the following budget resolutions this year.

Resolution 1: Keep dedicating the bulk of your budget to SEO and PPC.

SEO and PPC combined should remain the backbone of your online marketing and consume upwards of ⅔ or more of your budget in 2012, just as was the case in 2011. Yes, the new year does offer many new opportunities, technologies and trends in which to invest, but at least one of your resolutions should be to stick to the basics.

SEO is a long-term investment

Most SEO initiatives typically only grow in strength with age and will continue to reap rewards for years to come. In fact, when it comes to SEO, the old expression “nothing succeeds like success” is quite apt. A strong SEO program this year will help next year’s program perform better than it otherwise could. So don’t think of SEO like overhead, but literally as an investment that pays for itself over the course of years.

Budget-wise, you’ll distribute your SEO investment across three major domains. How much you invest in each domain depends on identifying your current strengths and weaknesses – focus your efforts (and budget) in 2012 on whatever areas you need to shore up.

  • On-page optimization: Make sure you’re continuing to target the right keywords, keep site content fresh, etc. See Resolution #2 for a more detailed discussion.
  • Off-page optimization: Acquire topically relevant, good quality, one-way links; this remains the #1 ranking factor used by Google to determine how relevant a page or website is for a given search term.
  • Mobile/local optimization: This area of SEO investment coincides with Resolution #4, so we’ll discuss it there.

PPC is a reliable traffic generator.

Meanwhile, pay per click (PPC) compaigning continues to be a viable, valuable channel for procuring relevant, targeted traffic: PPC functions at every stage of the travel buying cycle, from initial research to final booking. In your budget, make sure you allow ample spend with ads targeting your core audience, those that are in your home country or regional target market. Favor Google to Bing by 80 to 20, given Google’s outsized market share.

Mobile PPC is going to get even more important; again, we’ll discuss this in Resolution #4, but you almost certainly want to start shifting some of your standard PPC budget to mobile-specific campaigns.

Using PPC for testing is also a budget-friendly way of generating really useful data. Whether you want to experiment with new keywords, messaging, offers, promotions or brand new geographical markets, PPC yields tremendous data at relatively low cost and little commitment.

Resolution 2: Make sure your budget includes website maintenance and fresh content.

The online world — from human visitors to search engines indexing your site — demands frequently refreshed, high quality content. If you aren’t already dedicating some of your budget to keeping your website up-to-date, you must start in 2012. Be aware that even minor changes to a website (to say nothing of an overhaul or redesign) can really start to add up. Budget appropriately. Expect to invest about a tenth of your budget, or more if your site is old and stale.

Search engines favor solid, high value content. Part of the reason OTAs have been so successful is because they deliver the kind of content search engines love. Your site is no longer competing against other hotel websites that are in the same condition as yours; instead, you’re competing against the cutting-edge technology and content of the OTAs.

Take back control in 2012. Your budget should include items like:

  • Start or improve your blog. A blog has tremendous impact on SEO, so you can additionally budget for it under that header. This line item is well worth its own resolution, so we’ll talk about it in the next section.
  • Make regular content and site edits. Switch out photos and videos, update current page copy as appropriate, change behind-the-scenes SEO elements, and utilize keyword research so you can make sure the keyword focus of each page is still performing and not going stale.
  • Keep up-to-date with web technology. Many hotels compete on the shininess and advanced functionality of their websites, and if you don’t keep your site up-to-date, it will start to look dingy in comparison to your competitors. Website maintenance is an investment that pays off in better customer engagement and better search rankings.

Here are some website maintenance considerations to get you started:

  • How do you harvest emails?
  • Are your page load times impacting your rankings?
  • Is your photo gallery living up to its full potential?
  • Is your sales copy still relevant?
  • Are your offers and banner ads out-of-date?

Resolution 3: Budget for a hotel blog.

Whether you’re starting fresh, or taking your half-hearted blog into a full-fledged search and social media hub, you need to ramp up your hotel’s blog now. Aside from the fact it’s the single most powerful way to keep your site fresh, it can also:

  • Diversify keywords and rank for a greater range of broader keyword terms. In other words, you can use your blog to capture those terms that are critical during the travel buying process, but difficult to address on standard static hotel web pages, e.g. “best restaurants in Times Square” or “fun things to do in downtown Los Angeles”.
  • Appeal to search engines. For one thing, if you’re offering genuinely useful and interesting content, you’re creating link-bait, or pages that attract external links on their own strength. Then, as these pages remain live on your site for longer and longer, the search engines attribute more and more authority to them, which is an important factor in SEO algorithms.
  • Cultivate a loyal audience and following. A hotel blog establishes you as the authority on your local area. Current and prospective clients will subscribe to your updates to learn what’s happening in the area and where they should go during their visit.
  • Leverage social media for maximum impact. Social media is such a buzzword, but the truth is, it works. (See our first bonus resolution below). You can use your hotel’s blog to simultaneously prime your social media as the entry to a sales funnel, and to boost your reputation by promoting “shares” and “likes.”

Like website maintenance, a blog is an investment. In some ways, it’s extremely cost-effective to put together, and thus budget-friendly. The major blogging platforms, for example, are free. But as with most things, you get what you pay for. For a blog that shines, not just in design but in compelling content, expect to invest.

Luckily, you don’t need to create a brand new section of your budget for a blog (unless you want to go all out). Instead, because a blog benefits many areas of your online marketing, you can justifiably pull resources from different areas — SEO, social media, etc. For example, if the static portion of your site is still current, you could take a nice chunk of your website maintenance budget and focus it on the blog.

For more information about hotel blogging, please check out our ongoing blog development series.

Resolution 4: Increase, or at minimum start, your budget for mobile and local marketing online.

Once again, we return to the mobile world! Are you surprised? We’re past the point where a mobile-friendly site is sufficient. If you’re not on this train yet, your competitors ARE passing you by.

So go get one. Now. We’ll wait.

Yes, we’re joking, but in all seriousness, mobile is just that important. But it also means an additional online presence that requires refreshing and updating, just like your traditional website. Moreover, you’ll likely have a separate (albeit overlapping) SEO and PPC strategy specifically for your mobile site. This is true of PPC in particular: Google AdWords allows users to get really, really granular in what ads show when and to whom, including what devices and operating systems they’re using.

Mobile is important enough that you might dedicate a completely new section of your budget to it. Alternatively, or in addition, you may reallocate money under other headers. For example, as mentioned, we suggest you begin thinking about starting to shift your approach to PPC this year. Smart devices are becoming more common, and travelers have these devices with them all the time. That has several implications for the hotel market, not least of which is a rise in last-minute bookings. You don’t want to miss out on that, do you? We didn’t think so. That unbooked room tonight is costing you overhead without paying you back.

Going local is related to going mobile simply because so much of mobile optimization is held in the registration and optimization of the website on review and local area websites, map services and apps.

So if you’re attending to your mobile web presence, don’t ignore location services like Google Places. You also want to market on local websites — local travel blogs, websites that focus on travel to your local area or even special events companies from your area (like wedding planners).

Thankfully, advertising on local sites is generally fairly inexpensive, making that effort both low-impact and cost-effective for your budget. But you want to make sure you’re primed to make the most of that advertising, and that leads us to our next budget resolution…

Resolution 5: Invest in Conversion Optimization.

It’s no longer sufficient just to have more raw traffic, you must optimize conversion-to-booking. In other words, don’t just do more, do better.

Consider this: simply raising the number of conversions from one out of every 100 visits to two, doubles your online conversion ratio!

PPC (see Resolution #1) and even banner advertising (see Resolution #4) are both still alive and kicking. However, it’s more difficult to earn higher ROIs out of them than once was possible. Today, it’s key to have an incredible offer on the ad itself, preferably seasonally-focused, which will help increase ad click-through rates (CTRs). Then, land users on a targeted, customized landing page. This is the area where most hotels fail: they will run banner ads but will put no effort toward developing a landing page targeted toward the banner ad offer and audience.

Remember, online advertising is just a mechanism, a way of delivering relevant traffic to your site. You still have to sell the visitor on your hotel. Are you still thinking in terms of increasing the number of visits? That’s so 2011, and it’s only going to get you halfway in 2012. The remaining element: making sure a higher proportion of visitors books.

Budget-wise, invest in:

  • Landing pages: highly targeted pages that speak to a specific audience or campaign. Create different landing pages for PPC, banner advertising, email marketing and social media channels. In fact, when budgeting for one of these kinds of campaigns, just assume you’ll need to put together a landing page. That will bump up the initial investment cost, but as an asset, the landing page recoups the expense through a higher booking rate.
  • Update existing pages with conversion in mind: in other words, eliminate any explicit or implicit barriers to action, like too many calls-to-action or confusing navigation.
  • Testing: from basic analytics to focus group testing, it’s amazing how much data you can get about the behavior of visitors to your site. You need that information to make sure your online efforts are paying off (see our second bonus resolution for more information).

Remember, you’re investing this portion of your budget in assets that will pay off in bookings and/or valuable information like prospective guest email addresses. You can justifiably dedicate money from your PPC and website maintenance areas to conversion optimization, or create its own section in your budget.

Bonus Resolution: Social media actually works – so work it!

This isn’t so much a bonus budget resolution as an emphasis of Resolutions #3 and potentially even #4: social media can be really powerful if you give it the resources — time and content — that it needs to flourish.

When confronted about social media direction and strategy, the big questions continue to swirl amongst hotel management. How do we capitalize on it? How do we execute social media initiatives? For that matter, what are the most cost-effective initiatives?

These are good questions that don’t necessarily have easy answers. But we know this much: social media represents the division of online marketing with the biggest growth and increase in yearly expenditure (though mobile marketing is beginning to give it some stiff competition for this title). Plus, social media is flexible and can be used in a variety of ways:

  • Brand buzz
  • Advertising special offers
  • Customer service
  • Reputation management
  • Etc.

The bottom-line is to make sure you’re delivering value to your social media audience. Usually that means some form of engagement, whether it’s personable interaction or posting content they find useful, interesting and/or entertaining.

An engaging blog (see Resolution #3) can be used a social media hub; it can drive an awful lot of social media activity on its own merits, without additional cost. But you will still want to dedicate some resources to engagement activity directly on your chosen social media channels to make sure you’re making the most of them.

Bonus Resolution: Commit to solid, data-driven decision-making this year.

Again, this isn’t so much a bonus budget resolution as an approach to online marketing that can strengthen your returns across the board.

In short, when making marketing budget decisions, don’t guess or estimate. Analytics systems like Google Analytics provide a generous array of data. Yes, it can be hard to comprehend, but that’s why there are specialized tools, like the gold-standard Revinate or our own Online Performance Dashboard (designed specifically for hotels) to help break down and segment the data.

Whatever system you use, it’s key to realize these numbers point the way to better marketing decisions, and thus more bookings.

Use this data to track performance across all your varied campaigns and channels. But you can ratchet up the results with tests. Landing pages (see Resolution #5) are a fantastic place for this. You can try variations of packages, pricing, branding, imagery, taglines, whatever you want to test; analytics will reveal the winners. In fact, only through careful, continuous testing and analysis, can you drive sustained improvements in performance over time.

Great information; I’m ready to translate them into actual dollars.

Then we invite you to check out our new Online Marketing Budget Tool for Hotels. It’s totally free to use, though if you request the expanded commentary, we do ask that you subscribe to our newsletter. The expanded commentary details where every dollar goes; specific expenses, activities and line items included; and why.

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